What is colocation?

Colocation is a hosting option for small businesses who want the
features of a large IT department without the costs. Many large
corporations have the Internet infrastructure to host their own web
servers and have a team of IT professionals to manage and design the
site, individuals and small companies do not. There is a wide range of
options available from simple hosting to running your own Web servers
off of a dedicated Internet connection. One such option is colocation.
In the first part of this series, we will examine why one would chose
colocation over the other hosting options.

Colocation allows you to place your server machine in someone else's
rack and share their bandwidth as your own. It generally costs more than
standard Web hosting, but less than the comparable amount of bandwidth
for your place of business. Once you have a machine set up, you
physically take it to the location of the colocation provider and
install it in their rack or you rent a server machine from the
colocation provider. Your colocation company then provides an IP,
bandwidth, and power to your server. Once it is up and running, you
access it much like you would access a Web site on a hosting provider
the difference being that you own the hardware.

Advantages of colocation

The biggest advantage of colocation is the cost for bandwidth. For
example, a low cost limited bandwidth business grade DSL line generally
costs around $150 to $200, but for the same price or less a single
server can be placed in a colocation facility that provides higher
bandwidth speeds and better redundancy for the network connections.
These savings can be even greater if the only dedicated network access
is a more expensive full or fractional T1 lines.

Colocation facilities have better outage protection. During a long
ice-storm last year, my office was without power for three days. While
we have a backup generator, it wasn't powerful enough to keep the
server running that entire time, so our Web Sites were down during that
outage. Through a colocation provider, we are paying for power
generators and backup power to protect against that type of situation.

We own the server machinery. If we decide that the machine is too
slow or does not have enough memory, we can simply upgrade the server.
We do not have to wait for our provider to get around to upgrading it.

We own the server software. We do not have to rely on our hosting
provider to install the software or tools we want to use. We simply do
it ourselves. If we decide to use ASP or ColdFusion, we just
purchase and install the software.

If we move, we can leave the server up and running the entire time.
When we host our own domains we have to either pay for two lines to
move the domains to the new location or deal with outages while the
servers are moved to the new location.

Most colocation servers offer a service where they will manage and
maintain your server for you for an extra cost. This is especially
useful if you do not have IT team members or your office is located far
from the provider.